Make no mistake about it, NBC
warfare is a ghastly affair and many people in the Military
consider it a 'dirty' way of waging war. Contrary to popular
belief it was used right at the beginning of organised warfare.
Bodies of people who had died of some of the more hideous
diseases were catapulted into besieged cities or dumped into the
water supply, as were anthrax ridden animals. Science has only
found more efficient ways of creating and delivering the nasties.

My first taste of this side of
warfare was on my Basic Training Course, dressed in our 'Noddy
Suits' and respirators we were taken into a chamber filled with
CS gas - officially described as a non toxic smoke. Here we went
through several drills, then as a demonstration of how good our
protection was one by one told to take off our respirators. Some
people merely had to state their Name, Rank and Number then let
out into the fresh air. Some of us though had to do other things.
My particular task was to sing a couple of verses of 'Zippity Do
Dah'. It was great. Zippity Do Dah, Choke, Zippety Day,
gasp,cough, my oh, wheeze, my, what a wonder, wheeze, choke cough
ful day. After being dragged outside we had to stand like
scarecrows till the wind blew the smoke particles off of us. We
were warned not to rub the itches or try to get rid of them by
washing, but there are always people who don't do what they're
told and we had a great time watching the people who didn't go a
nice motley shade of beetroot.

A couple of years later I
became an instructor and the training course for this was fun.
People who become instructors in the Army usually really enjoy
the subject the're teaching, and are very enthusiastic. One of
our instructors certainly was. "I've got 17 spare canisters
for my respirator" he'd say, "and if you're stupid
enough to use up the two you're issued with I f****** wouldn't
even p*** on you let alone give you one of mine, in fact I'd raid
you're rucksack to see if you've got any spare ones". This
certainly was an enthusiastic devotee of staying alive in a
chemical environment. "My wife knows more about chemical
warfare than you lot" was another saying of his. I bet his
homelife was fun.

During one lecture the lesson
was stopped and the instructors bought in a couple of ultra
violet lights. It was explained to us that before the lecture had
started some very fine efflorescent dust had been sprayed about
the room and that it was designed to demonstrate how a
contaminate could spread, to us it seemed a great way of seeing
who had been scratching their balls, picking their noses or for
some reason had their fingers stuck in their ears. One chap in
particular looked as if he'd been sat at the back giving himself
a whole body massage.

One way of livening up
proceedings was to make the gas chambers fun. We were informed
that NBC defence lacks the glamour of say squeezing a machine gun
trigger until the barrel starts glowing, making huge craters
everywhere, or crashing across the landscape in some very big and
powerful machinery, also, some people find the thought of
chemical warfare very disturbing and if they don't pay attention
to the lectures then perhaps it won't happen to them. One day
someone organised a 'boat race' - a drinking game where you drink
a glass of beer and put the empty glass on your head to signify
that it's empty, in a CS filled chamber. Now that was real fun,
well it was, until people started throwing up.

Talking about throwing up, one
day a few of us attended a TEWT - technical exercise without
troops, these are designed so that command post staff and others
can practice drills. These TEWTS were conducted under various
conditions and could get very stressful. Decisions taken in these
command posts, if made in battle, could affect the lives of
hundreds if not thousands of men. This often made people nervous
as it wasn't your physical prowess that was being tested but your
brain, and it was very good at pinpointing people, who under
certain conditions, may become affected by 'the fog of war'.
Newcomers to these usualy spent the previous couple of days
reading manuals and familiarising themselves with proceedures,
old hands just went out and got drunk, sometimes though people
managed to overdo it. This particular time, the people running it
decided that things were going a little too well and informed us
that we'd been DFd (our radio transmissions had been picked up
and our general vicinity calculated by the enemy) and that we'd
come under a heavy chemical attack. So we donned our respirators,
and carried on. Unfortunately one of our number had a very bad
hangover and after spending about half an hour in a hot sweaty
rubber tasting respirator his body rebelled and he suddenly threw
up. Those of us near him have a very vivid memory of his
respirator suddenly bulging outwards and then vomit filling up
the eyepieces and finally breaking the seal between his face and
the rubber before he could rip the thing off.

On the instructors course we
spent a fair amount of time learning procedures to be used when
fighting in a nuclear contaminated battlefield, as if anyone
would want to be stupid enough to do such a thing. One particular
item bothered me, how come when we worked out the dosages that
soldiers are expected to be able to withstand, why are they a lot
higher than those normaly credited to civilians? Are we going to
be fed a diet rich in lead before going to war?

In our training we use non-toxic
agents, apparently other Armies use a diluted form of a 'live'
agent. By all accounts the Russian Army once lost part of a
regiment when someone supplied them with undiluted nerve gas.